Myth Busters: the rising awareness of disparity between male and female composers
This is a hard article to write.
This past March, I posted an article on my Facebook wall out of the Telegraph, an European publication. The original article can be found here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/01/bbc-proms-backlash-gender-balance-will-see-fading-opportunities/.
For those of you who are trying to read this on your oh-so-short lunch break, let me sum it up for you: there has been some uproar within the classical music community over the BBC’s recent pledge to award half of their prestigious Proms’ commissions to female composers. The Proms join 45 other international music festivals in their pledge to level the playing field for female composers by 2020.
The reasoning? The quota would ‘discriminate against older male composers’.
I have to admit---I laughed out loud while reading this. The disparity in compositional representation between the sexes has always been widely-acknowledged. Surely an inclusive movement that will slowly be instigated over the next twelve years couldn’t be THAT controversial. Then I posted it on my social media handles, complete with little quips about how I couldn’t believe anyone could actually get upset about this.
I assumed that I would be joined in my incredulity. Instead, I was quickly met with a wave of angry, impassioned responses from unlikely sources--including one of my former professors.
‘These organizations are already offering a TON of opportunities for female composers,” he wrote.
...but are they?? I mean, REALLY???
The new quotas should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the classical musical world news. The BBC Proms have come under serious public criticism in the past few years for gender disparity issues, such as their 2017 practically-all-male-festival-lineup (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/26/proms-music-festivals-gender-pledge). After the initial public outcry, the Proms admitted to fault and decided to do something to level the playing field for female composers. Their decision to split invitations seems like a logical one--after all, in 2017, only 10 of the 29 contemporary composers chosen to participate in the Proms were women.
For those of you keeping track, that’s nearly DOUBLE the amount of male recipients to female recipients.
Prom director David Pickard went so far as to issue a statement that the organization’s decision to turn towards more female inclusion was “vital to the creative development of the world’s largest classical music festival”.
Ironically, one of Pickard’s largest challengers on this point is female--Sally Cavender, vice-chairman of Faber Music. Cavender issued a public statement the day after the Proms’ announcement, saying that the quota was “unnecessary” as there has been a “huge recent expansion of opportunities” for female composers in the classical music world (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/01/bbc-proms-backlash-gender-balance-will-see-fading-opportunities/ ). She herself felt that “the playing field is relatively level in terms of opportunities and encouragement”.
Again, for those of you keeping track: This is a woman-- a major figure in the classical music publishing world, no less--actively campaigning AGAINST installing inclusive measures that would assist other women.
Cavender went even further, claiming that the BBC’s pledge to reach a 50/50 balance for new Proms commissions would mean that “opportunities for talented men will have to fade regardless of their talent or pre-eminence, given that there is only so much space in programmes for new music” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/01/bbc-proms-backlash-gender-balance-will-see-fading-opportunities/). In a letter to The Times, she is quoted as saying, “I have never witnessed any discrimination against female composers; what I have seen is that there were formerly fewer of them.”
This was the same dispute that my ex-professor made: that there is no active discrimination against female composers---there are simply less of them in existence.
Why on earth would this be? The current male-to-female ratio in the world is thought to be 101 males to 100 females (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio). With the sexes so closely balanced, it can’t be as simple an issue as all that. I decided to dig a little deeper and really start examining the issues. Over the past month, I’ve spoken to dozens of female composers. I’ve collected their stories and points of view, and in the process, several common arguments seemed to re-emerge again and again. For any of you out there who might be encountering the same ‘mythical’ arguments, I’d like to debunk them one by one.
Myth #1: There is no disparity between male and female composers.
If you Google ‘female representation in classical music’, one of the associated question that pops up is ‘what is a female orchestra conductor called?’
Why might this be such a popular question?
Answer: Because female conductors are so rare, we genuinely don’t know what to call them.
In a 2016 article entitled ‘Where Are All the Women in Classical Music?’, writer Jennifer Rivera laments her findings with female leadership in the modern classical music world (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-rivera/where-are-all-the-women-i_1_b_12095342.html). Rivera describes her experience scanning through a New York Times article that discussed upcoming classical music projects. At the time, Rivera was arranging a festival that was focused on female-identifying artists. She writes:
But because our festival is focusing on women — we are presenting works created by, led
by, and about women — the next thing I did was checked to see how many of the projects
listed could be described as being created by or led by women from the 20 listings for
October (the month our performances take place). Of the 20 listings, I found one piece
composed by a woman and one piece with a woman conductor. None of the staged pieces
(as far as I could tell) had a female director. Not super great ratios happening there. And
to be clear — this is not the fault of the New York Times for not reporting — on the
contrary; there have been a couple of stories just in the past few weeks in the NYT about
women conductors and women’s leadership roles at the Met. The problem is not with the
reporting, it’s with what’s being reported upon: there is still a large dearth of women in
leadership roles in classical music.
So okay, female leadership isn’t great in classical music. But what about composition specifically? Surely that number might be a little bit less grim? In a article that came out this month, the Boston Symphony Orchestra crunched some data numbers to create a quick comparison between male and female composers (https://www.bsomusic.org/stories/by-the-numbers-female-composers/). According to a recent survey of the 22 largest American orchestras, women composers accounted for only 1.8 percent of the total pieces performed in the 2014-2015 concert season. Female composers only accounted for 14.3 percent of performances of works by living composers.
14.3 percent, ya’ll.
To quote Kristin Kuster, a prolific American female composer, “These numbers are both abysmal and embarrassing, particularly in this day and age.” If you’re having difficulties wrapping your head around exactly what 14.3 percent might look like, don’t worry--the BSO came to your rescue with this handy-dandy, depressing graphic:
Sometimes, seeing truly IS believing.
Myth #2: Existing female composers are already receiving as much attention and appreciation as their male colleagues.
Apparently, some of you missed the graph above...
In all seriousness, this is another argument that many dissenters of the Prom inclusivity movement state: that the opportunities being presented to the currently-existing female composers are fairly and equally shared with their male colleagues.
Um...no.
I mean, I can insert the graph again, if you like…
The enormous variations in opportunities between male and female composers should not come as a surprise to anyone--they’ve been documented, researched, and noted for several years now, both nationally and internationally. In 2014, Sound and Music, a UK-based national charity for new music, began to notice that their composer application data was highlighting a serious problem (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-women-composers-talent-not-tokenism). Within every single stage of artistic development, the gap between male and female applications dramatically widened. At the GCSE level (the basic level for composers), there was a 50% gap between male and female applicants. The summer school, a more advanced program, featured only 35% female applicants, and the various professional artist development programmes only received 25% female applicants (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-women-composers-talent-not-tokenism).
There might be some of you out there nodding and saying to yourself, “Yeah, but that’s just one organization’s information. It could be faulty or misleading.” Stick with me--it gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it..).
Let’s take a look at the British Music Collection, an amazing resource that happens to hail from the same country as the Proms. Located both online and in a physical form at the University of Huddersfield, it gathers information about composers, scores and recordings (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-women-composers-talent-not-tokenism). It also manages to document a history of 20th- and 21st-century music that is overwhelmingly male-dominated. As of 2018, only 13% of the documented composers in Great Britain are female. Representation of women in the classical music industry in general remains very low in all European countries; women currently represent 20% or less of registered composers and songwriters. The reported earnings for female composers remain lower than their male counterparts within European countries.
With all of this evidence to the contrary, how could anyone possibly claim that opportunities between the sexes are currently equal? You would expect such overwhelming evidence of a lack of female participation to encourage everyone within the classical music community to celebrate the Proms’ inclusivity clause.
You’d be wrong.
Myth #3: There is no active discrimination against female composers.
This is where things get rough.
This is where I start to write stuff that you’re not going to want to read, or that, when you read it, will make you exclaim out loud, ‘That can’t POSSIBLY be true!’
...I assure you, the rumors are true.
In their 2015 article exploring discrimination against women in the classical music world, the Guardian documented several disturbing cases that involved some high-profile participants (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/28/why-male-domination-of-classical-music-might-end). The first dealt with Marin Alsop, a brilliant international conductor who became the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms in 2013. Prior to the event, she was interviewed on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs about her struggles within her chosen career. Upon telling her music teacher she wanted to be a conductor, Alsop was shocked by their response, “Girls don’t do that.” When she finally was invited to act as conductor for the Last Night of the Proms, Alsop chose to speak briefly from the podium on how she was ‘astonished that there would still have to be a first anything for a woman’ (it should be noted that Alsop had covered the podium with pink balloons and a banner proclaiming “IT’S A GIRL” specifically for the momentous occasion). The same Guardian article described another event in 2013, in which the head of the Paris Conservatoire, Bruno Mantovani, declared that conducting was “ too physically demanding” for a woman. Within the same paragraph, the Guardian describes the Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko supposedly stating that a girl on the podium might distract male musicians.
I found this statement to be particularly amusing--even my dog can easily follow a stick upon demand without becoming distracted by my femininity.
Perhaps the BBC Radio 3’s editor, Edwina Wolstencroft, said it best when she was interviewed about the station’s active inclusivity programming (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/28/why-male-domination-of-classical-music-might-end). Wolstencroft bluntly stated:
The music world has been happy to have female performers – the female as muse, or as conveyor of male genius – for a long time. But owning authority and power in public is another matter. That’s where females conductors have had a hard time. Our society is more resistant to women being powerful in public than to women being entertaining.
So female conductors are getting flack, but what about female composers? Why would they encounter resistance when they aren’t physically on a podium? Well, this is where the factor of something called ‘unconscious bias’ pops up.
Forbes Magazine defines unconscious bias as ‘deeply subconscious attitudes span race, gender, appearance, age, wealth and much more’ (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/03/23/unconscious-bias-in-the-workplace-you-cant-afford-to-ignore-it/#7c5cc6707660). These bias can influence every choice that you make, from the products you purchase to the people you promote at work...or who you don’t. They are ‘reflexively triggered’, which makes them difficult to control.
Eastburn addressed the underlying bias against female composers within the classical music world in her fabulous article, ‘We Need More Women Composers--And It’s Not About Tokenism, It’s About Talent’ (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-women-composers-talent-not-tokenism). In it, she states:
I know that this isn’t what people consciously think. But unconscious bias is real and
we are all dealing with it, all the time. Unconscious biases are at work when women
composers are treated less seriously than their male counterparts and this treatment can take many forms, from asking questions about their personal lives rather than their music, to offering shorter or lighter commissions, or even (a real-life example) asking a famous female composer who had helped her with her orchestral piece, because she clearly couldn’t have done it all by herself.
Perhaps one could argue that those in positions of power are not consciously avoiding female composers’ works; nevertheless, they certainly cannot argue as to whether or not such avoidance exists.
Myth #4: That inclusive actions are somehow inherently discriminatory.
This is perhaps the most popular claim of the 50:50 initiative’s opposition: that consciously including works by women somehow counts as active discrimination against male composers. The official name for this ridiculous claim is ‘reverse discrimination’.
I like to call reverse-discrimination the ‘incredible-shrinking pie theory’: there is only so much pie to share, and if someone is actively assuring that one group gets more pie than it previously received, it must mean that another group will unjustly receive less pie.
This toxic, fear-induced manner of thinking has caused sexism and racism to rise to the forefront over the past year and a half: the notion that more for me ultimately means less for you.
Ignoring the insanity of this statement...can we all at least agree that classical music is not pie??
Some dissenters take this ‘reverse discrimination’ claim even further, swearing that actively seeking out and supporting female composers would distract or deviate away from the music itself. They seem to truly believe that the quality of commissions and programming overall would somehow slip due to inclusivity. It is no longer just about experiencing or appreciating the music--it’s about the ‘feminist agenda’, that slippery slope of estrogen-induced aesthetic that dismantles everything around it until we are all enveloped in fuzzy pink blankets, discussing the Vagina Monologues.
I’m hoping you can feel my eyes rolling through the computer screen at this.
This is a particularly vicious argument, because it undermines the very nature of inclusivity. It reduces the hard work and efforts of female composers into cute, trite ‘fluff pieces’ that are incapable of expressing any deep or meaningful communication. It implies that anyone who actively programs female composers’ works is merely attempting to be ‘hip’ or ‘cutting-edge’, or worse---practicing ‘tokenism’, that mealy-mouthed act of recruiting the underrepresented in an attempt to appear inclusive. Sound and Music CEO Susanna Eastburn wrote about this discovery:
I blogged about it at the time and we introduced clearer expectations for how we
wanted to work with partners (no all-male programming in final performances, no
all-male selection panels). It was revealing to see how this was received. In many cases
it was welcomed, but it also led to some of the most difficult exchanges I’ve ever had in
my professional career. This is a topic about which emotions run high and the punctum
seems to be that giving consideration to gender when putting together a programme
displaces the primary concern and responsibility of an artistic programmer, which
have to be for artistic quality above all. Consciously including one or more works by
women means that it is no longer just about the music.
Eastman asked her readers to consider, ‘If it’s agreed that talent is not more prevalent in one gender than another, then this falling away of women is a terrible waste and loss of unique musical voices” (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-women-composers-talent-not-tokenism).
Myth #5: Female composers are not equally represented in classical music because their work is not as high of a quality as that of their male counterparts.
…yes, I actually DO have to write this, because it’s real.
This was one of the arguments that sparked this entire article.
This was the other argument that my ex-professor presented to me--that works by female composers aren’t equally represented in classical music/history because ‘their work just isn’t as good’. This was a man who had worked in academia for many, many years, who I had respected and looked at as an authority on classical music, who I had paid a lot of my money to take classes with--and who was unknowingly admitting aloud that he valued his female colleague’s creative output as naturally being ‘lesser’.
This isn’t an uncommon argument, either. Eastman points out that this argument is often backed up by another: that ‘history is an effective filter for quality’ (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-women-composers-talent-not-tokenism). Over the course of decades, only good, quality musical work will survive the test of time, while lesser works will naturally fall away. Therefore, one of the reasons that more female composers’ works aren’t in existence is because they somehow must be inherently ‘lesser’ or of poorer quality.
Pardon me whilst my head explodes.
What the dissenters are assuming is that history has been fair and equal to all races and genders; they’re willfully ignoring the fact that history has always been written by those in positions of power. By their ‘the cream rises to the top’ argument, the native songs of conquered indigenous nations, such as Hawaii and Polynesia, were not worth worrying over. The works and scores that were burned by the Nazis and lost forever were naturally inferior. A multitude of offenses and erasures against art history can be effectively excused, especially when they were produced by women, because they would have naturally disappeared anyway.
History is also profoundly affected by social norms that were acceptable generations ago, but that are no longer considered socially acceptable. If the male-dominated Western society in the 1600-1800’s frowned upon women being seen outside of the home, let alone participating in scandalous activities such as composing, we can assume this might factor largely into the general lack of female compositions currently existing moreso than their artistic quality. BBC Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch nailed it on the head when she was interviewed discussing the dissention against their latest pro-female-inclusive programming (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/28/why-male-domination-of-classical-music-might-end):
I’m sure that, had women had the same opportunities to compose over those centuries,
there would be an equal number of masterpieces by women. They didn’t have the
opportunities that composers need to study and improve. Mozart was born a genius, but
it took many years, a lot of contact with musicians and a lot of public performances for
him to reach a point where he was writing masterpieces. I realized that if we looked
primarily at the publishers’ lists, not only would we end up with primarily men, but
they’d be people of a certain age, people of a certain background and people who
composed in a certain way.
Unfortunately, in the case of my previous professor, it was an exercise in frustration to point out any of these counterarguments. Perhaps I should have answered with the Guardian’s opening statements in their article ‘Genius is gender blind--and so should we be’ (https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/mar/05/women-composers-genius-radio-3-international-womens-day?CMP=share_btn_fb):
Someone asked me the other day if the reason there are fewer women composers
represented at the highest level was that male composers were simply better. My
response was unrepeatably rude. Frankly, it’s too ludicrous a question to validate with a
polite answer. My litmus test for those kinds of comments is this: replace “female” with
“black”, and “male” with “white”. Now put the question to me again, and see how
comfortable you feel asking it.
WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT:
Vanessa Reed, CEO of PRS Foundation, said: “The push for gender parity across society continues and with increased public awareness of inequalities across the creative industries, we have an opportunity to respond and commit to tangible change in music … I hope that this will be the start of a more balanced industry which will result in benefits for everyone.” (http://keychange.eu/ )
Issues such as this can often seem overwhelming and hopeless, but change often starts with the smallest of actions. As an artist and an ally, you can actively choose to support your female composer colleagues. You can ask them about their experiences, and you can listen to them. You can explore new musical works by female composers and discuss them with teachers, mentors, coworkers, anyone who’ll listen. You can recommend works to your colleagues, and you can introduce your family and friends to your favorite new female composers’ body of work. You can actively program new works on your own events and recitals. You can write into newspapers discussing disparities between genders (or write blogs about it). You can call into your local classical radio station and request to hear a work by a female composer. You can promote change with your dollar by seeking out opportunities to support female composers. If a local symphony is programming a work by a female composer, consider purchasing a ticket to show support (physically showing up to the concert is also show of solidarity). If a local symphony is not programming works by female composers, write in and mention it. Host an evening or event with your friends and colleagues where you all discuss style and form of some of your favorite female composers.
Be the change you wish to see.